The Future of SEO is Not SEOview commentsSearch engine optimization, as all traditional definitions describe it, is going to become obsolete. And the change has already begun.The Internet has always been a landgrab. It started with domain...

The Two Most Overlooked Opportunities in Corporate America

"Why should the business pay for that? How will that impact top line revenue?" Although it may have been a while since you asked or have been asked either of these questions at your place of business, I bet you are familiar with them — and just as familiar with the goat rodeos that arrive when the questions are asked.

Opportunity Knocks

These perfectly reasonable questions are typically the starting point of a downward spiral. The casualties of these questions are many, but we usually mourn the physical losses most because the opportunity they represent is easier to see.

These two ideas and the rhetoric that is used to shut them down are present in so many corporate settings that a majority of readers have probably personally been involved in the very debate described.

The why and how of these opportunities being overlooked may vary in the exact ways they occur, but they each have the same root — a belief in the universality of cause and effect. In this article, I will give concrete examples of how to best counter such arguments and help you overcome the barriers to reaping the rewards of automated processes and clarity of purpose — the two most overlooked opportunities in Corporate America today.

Overlooked Opportunity No. 1

Automating the Automatable: Choosing not to automate tedious, error prone manual tasks in medium and large enterprises is the first overlooked opportunity we will be discussing. Executive management is fond of directing their staffs to “pour more monkeys into that barrel" (this is an actual quote from a CIO I once worked with). This style of leadership is a direct result of a hierarchal culture in which distance breeds contempt.

You may be unaware of the IT shops that religiously automate everything that is automatable and the benefits that they derive from it. It is very unlikely, however, that you are unfamiliar with the consequences that arise when your shop chooses to remain manual.

How many times have you been told that a new product or service cannot possibly launch within your time frame because the QA process takes 6 weeks or more? How many times have you been told that you can't spin up a new market experiment because the environment setup process has to be scheduled and requires anywhere from weeks to months depending upon the current workload of the operations teams that are required? How many times have you been told that once your experiment is live it will take days to weeks to capture and analyze the data necessary to gain even the beginnings of insight?

While the inflation of cycle time is a painful consequence of non-automation, the bigger concern is when the barriers to iteration become enormous. Iteration is most effective when the power of automation is brought to bear. When QA cycles shift from weeks to days or from days to minutes that’s when you start to gain serious momentum from project teams. When releases and deployments take minutes rather than hours, that’s when you can start to fail forward rather than roll back.

From the point of view of someone who has worked with a team that automates to the point of obsession, the frustration of working in an enterprise caught in the trap of manualism is akin to being a race car driver watching his pit crew use manual wrenches and jacks to change his tires rather than pneumatic tools. What’s worse for the automation savvy person is that when he asks the pit crew to start using power tools, quite often the manualists say they’re too busy changing the tires to look into that and it probably wouldn’t work anyway.

The most challenging aspect of the manually driven IT enterprise is the task of remaining patient and calm when dealing with the individual and enterprise responses to calls to automate. The responses of the manualists vary depending upon the context, but tend to fall into one of the following narratives: “We don’t have time to manufacture time”, “That task is too complex to be automated”, “The consequences of a mistake are too high for that task. We prefer humans to do that”, “That task is so small, it’s not worth it”, “That task isn’t done often enough to make it worth it”.

The Future of SEO is Not SEOview commentsSearch engine optimization, as all traditional definitions describe it, is going to become obsolete. And the change has already begun.The Internet has always been a landgrab. It started with domain...

"Why should the business pay for that? How will that impact top line revenue?" Although it may have been a while since you asked or have been asked either of these questions at your place of business, I bet you are familiar with them — and just as familiar with the goat rodeos that arrive when the questions are asked.

About Us

CMSWire is a popular web magazine published by Simpler Media Group.
We focus on intelligent information management, digital customer experience management, and the emergence of social business tools and practices. Read more about us
or learn how to
advertise here.

The Future of SEO is Not SEOview commentsSearch engine optimization, as all traditional definitions describe it, is going to become obsolete. And the change has already begun.The Internet has always been a landgrab. It started with domain...